£46 LANGUAGE AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT O$ CHILDREN
education is to be seen in the capacity to talk and write about
plain things like a house agent. Good teaching with older children
will lead to a desire on their part to master the finer shades of
difference between apparently synonymous words and phrases,
3. CONTINUOUS SPEECH
The language used by children among themselves is the
language they have found easiest and most serviceable for the
expression of the thoughts and feelings habitual to them. The
idiomatic phraseology of their family circle embodies in its own
unique way the most vivid of their fundamental experiences.
This idiomatic phraseology may not commend itself to the
sophisticated purist, but it has, at least, the homely virtues of
human warmth and sincerity. It is difficult, therefore, if not
impossible, to get young children to>reclothe what they have
most deeply felt or thought in some superior vesture recommended
to them by a superior and educated elder. Children adopt the
language of grown-ups in so far only as it chimes in harmoniously
with their own needs. If their speech is unsatisfactory and needs
to be improved they can be introduced to fresh fields of experience
and helped to articulate what they think or feel about each novel
impression as it arrives in terms of the language that alone can
do justice to it.
If we examine speech formally, certain patterns of phrase and
sentence may be distinguished. Every child has a number of
these patterns at the back of his mind* rekdy for use when he
comes to speak or write. In Chapter III an attempt has been
made to set out in genetic succession a few of the generally
approved patterns of sentence-structure. Progress ^yill be seen
to consist in a growing power to hold together in the mind more
and more ideas of increasing complexity and to speak of them
with due regard for their relationship to otie another. The
mastery of a sentence-pattern reveals itself in the capacity to
repeat it at will in different words. We cannot say that a pattern
has been mastered until a child has made use of it on more than
# single occasion. Many writers have assumed, however, that
a child has the capacity to use a given pattern, say, a complex
sentence, as soon as one appears in his conversation, though it
may have been employed as a formula without any appreciation
of its peculiar form. This error vitiates a great deal of the con-
clusions so far drawn* as to the age at * which certain types of
sentence can be managed by little children.
Progress in speech also shows itself in a growing ability to tell
a story with proper attention to the various time relationships